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- - Etepsed (https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=2476)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nemonymous (Post 16350)

Thanks for reminding me of that!!!!!

And that makes me remember that the actual title was really "The Visitor etc."

Yes, the "etc." bit became a bit lost over the years. :drunk:

PS: "The Visitor Etc' contains a version of the original Etepsed-Egnis poem that started The Egnisomicon.

THE HOUND by HP Lovecraft
A reading in February 2009 by DF Lewis.
I have read this story aloud a number of times since I first read it to PFJ (Odalisque) at a 'Horror Orgy' in 1967. This reading is not perfect, but I'm sure many of the previous readings had the odd stumble. Madness indeed needs a stumbling fear...
I shall try again in due course to perfect this reading.
des

I think you questioned the nature of perfection in an old work called "Parket and Sprake" (a philosophical dialogue). Or am I wrong?

There have been mentions on this thread of Des' former local pub The Jack & Jill. As I recall, the pub appeared in at least one of Des' stories under the fictionalised name The Pail of Water. I don't know whether the nursery rhyme is well known to many non-British people, so I will explain that:

Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down
Broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after

As a child, although very familiar with this rhyme, I didn't realise that it was a piece of nonsense. Digging the well on the top of the hill requires a longer shaft than digging it at the foot of the hill. I think that I was in my 30s or 40s when this occurred to me.

The Jack & Jill pub was on the top of a hill (a very steep climb up from Woodmansterne station). It now occurs to that watering hole is a jocular term for a pub. Probably the Jack & Jill was so-named because it was a watering hole on the top of a hill.

:drunk:

Sometimes the Etepsed element in my old works can make them incomprehensible to almost anyone. Here's a case in point.

Recently, I saw -- in a Lewis Carroll Society publication -- a reference to the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. It concerns Achilles and the tortoise running a race. But how can Achilles ever win? He must first cover half the distance, then half of that, and half of that, and so on ad infinitum.

I was reminded that, back in the 70s, I'd written a poem on the subject, and was thinking of sending it to the Lewis Carroll Society. Unfortunately, looking at the old work, I discovered that Etepsed*Egnis played a pivotal role. Here's the passage (the whole poem runs to 130 lines):

And on that day with an effort heroic
Achilles read aloud
The entire Iliad.
But O "The Death of Aeschylus"
On the next day read but half
On the third day was a quarter
And on the fourth it was an eighth.
Halving, halving again, day on day
Day on day, year on year
At last was reached the final word
That word was "evermore"
One day it look for "ever"
The next was only "mo"
The "r" took up another day
And soon was brought the microscope
For reading fragments of the "e"...

E, e, e-e, E*E
What's he doing here?
Why mounted on his Egnis*Bird
He spans a dripping sky
The bird plucks up an elephant
To crack it on a rock...
But it falls on the hapless pair
And gobbles up their book
The book, the microscope
The bed, the room & all
Its hunger looms so vast...
In luck for the classicists
Another copy of the Iliad
Is existing in a shop
But the final work of Sophocles
Is lost for evermore...

:p**********************:p

It occurs to me now that the scenario of Achilles reading aloud to the tortoise was probably inspired by Des reading aloud to me. I wonder what Des will think of him as Achilles and me as the tortoise?

The poem moves on to temporal anomoly. After the destruction of their room, the pair travel at the speed of light. Achilles falls into the seige of Troy, while the tortoise is taken up by an eagle and dropped on the head of Aeschylus.

There's an anomaly in your spelling. :)

I can't remember that poem at all. Good then to read it again!

Me Achilles? Yep I'm a heel.

You the tortoise? The '"she'll" of Tuerqui's enjoyment in the future as well as the present? Let's hope the future is a new Spring, otherwise her aged head will be withdrawn for the longest hibernation of them all.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nemonymous (Post 17573)

There's an anomaly in your spelling. :)

My 1970s spelling was more or less one big anomaly!

And one of my 1960s poems was entitled A Rebuke to Spellers -- aimed chiefly at you for criticising my spelling of "rubbish" (with a single "b").
:drunk:

Time to revive this thread with a picture of me sitting in the Bunny Meadow, writing to Mr Lewis.

http://www.ligotti.net/picture.php?a...pictureid=2086

Another photo taken on the same occasion:

http://www.ligotti.net/picture.php?a...pictureid=2085